Aubrey waited to be collected.
She felt herself adjusting—what choice did she have?—to the scars, the oddly scented alcove, the gloomy parlor and the evasive men.
Every morning, Kev asked her questions over breakfasts of thin toast and slightly rancid kippers. They sat at the parlor’s small round table, the only sturdy piece of furniture in the room. Kev leaned his elbows on the faded covering, notebook and fountain pen ready.
“You remember being a cat?”
“I remember jumping. That was marvelous. It felt right, so—”
“—coordinated,” Dmitri said from the divan.
“Yes. And I was much warmer, all the time warm, not like now.”
Dmitri kindly dropped a blanket about her shoulders. Aubrey tried not to flinch.
“Could you hear better, see, or smell better?”
“Yes. No. It depended.”
“How long did you remember things—as a cat?”
She didn’t know. Her memory placed her at Lady Bradford’s ball, then under the stoop, then—nothing. Just brief lucid moments: hiding under the chaise longue in the family drawing room, spitting and scratching in a worn burlap sack.
“Does my family know where I am?”
“Yes. We sent a messenger. Yes.”
No, said a small clear part of Aubrey’s mind. But why would Kev lie?
At least she was still human. She disliked how relieved that made her feel, as if simply not being cat was enough, as if she should be grateful to Dmitri and Kev because she’d changed back in their care and hadn’t changed again. Who was she to say that they shouldn’t get credit for her restoration?
I’ll make a speech of thanks when my family comes to collect me. I’ll be suitably grateful.
Once Kev finished his questions for that day, Aubrey retreated to her alcove. She’d stacked the boxes and books in a corner, borrowed a blanket from the parlor to reinforce the curtains. It wasn’t home. It would never be home. I’ll be leaving soon. But it was bearable. She sat and read the tattered broadsheets—Dmitri had told the truth about how long she’d been away; the broadsheets covered politics and court cases from the previous fall and winter—or skimmed through the books, history tomes about long-dead potion masters.
Kev spent afternoons in a chamber on the other side of the storage room. My workshop, he called the chamber. His lair, according to Dmitri.
Dmitri was everywhere. Unlike Kev, he slept on the side of the parlor where a dim hallway led to the outside door. Aubrey went into the hallway once; Dmitri met her, smiling and long-suffering as he motioned her back into the parlor.
“I wasn’t going to leave,” she told him, which was true.
She was beginning to loathe Kev’s so-called home, but she was safe here. She was sure that Kev was a magician—not Academy-trained maybe, but being any kind of magician would explain why her family had given her over to Kev’s care. His questions were just questions. She was human now. The scars would fade. She would go home.
Except surely her family would have picked someone more respectable to look after her. If Kev was not Academy-trained, he must be what Academy students called a slum magician, a dabbler in potions who worked outside the Academy system.
Magicians could not be accused of committing illegal acts—not when practicing magic. In the previous century, Academy magicians used royal patronage to wangle immunity from legal action—after all, if the government wanted Academy potions, ministers should be prepared to defend Academy experiments. And besides, what magistrate would fault a magician for achieving the entirely unique and unexpected?
